Some of the same concerns came up on our fan forums and in our community manager Martin Kersteins words:

Rest assured that our new skill system will still allow you tons of variety. Guild Wars had a gazillion different skills to make a build – but the amount of viable builds wasn’t actually that high. It was very easy for players to cripple themselves – for example, you could bring Gash without Sever Artery – which was pointless. If you rated builds on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being an incredibly effective build, what we did is make sure that all players will be equipped with a 5, at minimum.

You will also be able to use different weapon combinations: If for example, you have an axe in your main hand, this will define your first three skills. Pick up a shield – this defines the next 2 skills. Switch to a mace in your offhand – those skills change, basically giving you a different set of combinations. Switch to a Greatsword and you get 5 completely different skills.

All of this is then complimented by your free choice for the other 5 slots. Yes, one slot is reserved for a healing skill, and one for an elite skill – but we are not talking about one healing skill here, you will have a variety of different heal and elite skills to slot, each with their different flavors, each changing the way you actually play (aka your build).

It all boils down to this: The amount of possible builds might be a little bit lower than in GW, but the amount of viable and useful builds you can actually use is much higher.

There is no new Steve Blum, since Steve Blum outdoes him in this game by voicing every male of the Charr race.

I can understand why they had him do it, though, after hearing his rendition of Pyre. As I’ve said previously, that man could vibrate a mug across a table with his voice alone, and for a large, bestial race, rumbly is good.

Don’t they, though? If there’s anything I really lamented in Guild Wars, it was the lack of knockback and visual feedback in general. It’s something that City of Heroes touched on and showed me why I should be interested, but Champions Online taught me that it was completely necessary. After playing the beefy, punchy combat of CO, which does have visual feedback, I’d be sad to go back to something that didn’t.

Not sure on the third Adv type but apparently there are new class types, so it could be something we’ve not seen before in GW. Paladin seems an obvious choice for the second soldier type, judging from the concept art.

I doubt there’ll be paragons or dervishes, not atleast in the form they were introduced in Nightfall anyways.. Eric Flannum listed the standard wieldable weapons in part 2 of his feature and it didn’t mention spears or scythes in them.

Only 3 scholar-classes makes predicting the new professions quite challenging, the original game had 5 caster-classes which were all pretty integral to the gameplay. Elementalist is confirmed, and I want to believe they kept mesmers as they’re the most original profession in the whole GW universe. The third one’s alot harder to guess, it’d be either monks or necromancer/ritualist hybrid (druid..?). The forced healing skill for everyone, focus on non-party PvE and water elementalists ability for nearby ally healing all indicate towards preparing to dropping the good ol’ party healer. It sounds like a very wild idea for a MMORPG, but it could be pulled off and it would liven up PvP enormously. Offence is best defence eh?

Rangers also a safe bet, I hope they also get some dagger skills so it’d make them a viable close-range weapon for them ( I always found it unnerving how rangers could keep firing their bows normally even if enemies were attacking them from all sides). I’m thinking we’ll be seeing assassins again as well, maybe by a different name but a dual-wielding specialist with speed boosts nontheless. For the rest 2 professions, it’s anyone’s guess. I hope Arenanet comes up with something original and interesting :).

I would like to see to get an elementalist get owned. The animations in these videos look great, and the damage that is done looks believable, but you don’t see if the same counts for damage done to players. It would be cool if they managed to make that look believable too, while still keeping it fun to play.

I had problems to identify myself with the original game (GW1). My problem was that the powers failed to feel to me like extensions of myself. Wen I launch a fireball, is my internal fire, trought a implosion of troughthing, that grow from my fingers and is launched to some poor bastar that soon will get 8000º hotter. Thats how a power sould feel, but to me GW1 feel more like having a cake in the pocket, and touching that cake produced some nice particle effects of different colors and properties, but all the cake and properties feel the same. Most powers feel characterless to me. Maybe I have played Mount & Blade too much. I like the feel of a arrow in my hand, the way Mount & Blade feel, I want the same thing on a magic game.

This videos look awesome. But I can’t get hyped because I have see other nice videos with AION, and I don’t want to fall again for just graphics. Graphics are good, and deserve to buy a game like AION, but not play it longer than one month.

So, please: make all the spells feel different. Make spells from Guy “A” look slighty different than spells from Guy “B”. I don’t know, maybe make fireballs from guy with blue eyes have a slighty blue tint, and fireballs from guy with brown eyes, have a small tint color. I am talking about a RPG game, where everything is connected. I am not talking about a FPS game where you have 6 tipe of games and 6 tipes of mobs, and you have to use the weapons on the mobs. I am talking about something with more life. The thing that most today mmorpg games lack: life.

Also, I have no problem with a bit of slavery, and human combustion. What other people call “gore”. Gore is wen a powerfull wizard level 30 launch a smallish firewall to a level 1 NPC, but the different of levels make so the npc’ not only burn, but explode in a rain of gibs. Gibs on fire, of course. Optionally, you can add the smell of burning meat to the air. Delicious cooked meat (note: this may be imposible, since today computers don’t support smells, reserve the idea for GW3 )

On the other hand, you can always play the table rpg “Mage: The Ascension” for a game with the elements you describe. Never found any magic system beating this one btw. Would be kinda hard to implement in a game however as it’s already quite difficult to manage on tabletop.

That said, for “life” in an mmo you can still look forward to 2020, seems that the first real brain/computer interfaces development contract would be coming ot its end then. Maybe we’ll get to see a Neuromancer level system before our brains get too damaged by aging to test it.

I can see the future title for ArenaNet game: “Guild Wars 7: enter the Gwen”… hmmm… wait… well at least i’m sure it would sell millions.

What Tei wants seems unreasonable by RPG standards as well, though, as not even Dragon Age came marginally close to that.

There has to be a point where we accept the limitations of current technology, yes?

As was said above, given another 9 years we might be at a point where these things will be possible, but to be honest, these things (or at least the way they’re described) aren’t the most important to me. If Guild Wars 2 can be like Guild Wars 1 with playable Charr, visual feedback in combat, personalised stories, and maybe, just maybe an animal ecology (a la Gothic III) then I’ll be happy.

I can’t expect more of an MMORPG than what an RPG is capable of today.

I’m with Wulf on this one. It’s mostly eye candy. Plus, to me uber powerful magic would not be looking like endless gesticulations, it’d pretty much be one guy snapping fingers and the other one instantly vaporizing into dust.

To each his own I guess, GW has always been a nice compromise between sobriety and pyrotechnics. Also, complicated animations -while fun at the start- tend to soon become redundant and tedious in the lambda player experience.

Sober, short and pretty animations do better in general, especially considering long term MMO gameplay.

Exactly. Not only that, but could you imagine how slow the combat would be if the mages had to stand around, flailing their arms about, slowly catching on fire and the like? One of the reasons Guild Wars is fun is because the combat is fast, and that’s something they seem to be embracing with Guild Wars 2.

I don’t mind just pulling a pretty fireball out of my pocket. I don’t need gore, I don’t need a massive build up, I don’t need it to have loads of shaders to make it look as much like a flame as possible, because all of these things would inevitably slow the game down. And Guild Wars is anything but slow.

@Wulf
That said, they had you hover in mid air as an elementalist for like 3 secs while you cast certain spells, even for average 1-2 sec cast times (2 was a fireball) there’s no reason you couldn’t have a cool spell casting animation. Hell if they wanted to go all out, they could give you a voice/casting animation selection to personalise your character. It’s not actually adding that much to the game.

Additionally, elementalists always had the most diverse hair colour selection, you could simply use something like that to give each spell a “personal flair”. Give certain spell effects a “streak” in the effect that’s the same color as an elementalists hair, or whatnot.

I would be excited about this game (and the original guild wars, incidentally) if they would give the ladies clothes that…clothe them. Do you suppose it’s a woman-don’t-get-paid-as-much-as-men phenomenon, so that female elementalists can only afford 20% of a shirt?

there’s a large variety of armour sets for each class, not all of them are skimpy.

but yes, the elementalist lasses do have the skimpier ones, which i think makes sense given their overall outlook and attitude….someone that calls down meteors and sheaths themselves in pyres don’t really need armour..and they probably like the attention. =)

But yeah, this is high fantasy. Very high fantasy, in fact. Magic everywhere, so people largely wear whatever the hell they want, because everyone is beautiful and armor is just a numerical value applied to warrior classes.

I really don’t mind. A lot of the classes had skimpy outfits for the males as well. There was one set of Necromancer armor that wasn’t armor at all – it was a set of magical tattoos. And that’s all they wore, pretty much, male or female.

It’s not that I am opposed to it because it’s “unrealistic” or anything like that — I just mean that in High Fantasy or any other setting, I am a fan of modesty. :-) Even while throwing fireballs!

(for example I loved Wizardry 8, but I stopped playing that game when I got to the giant trees, because those fairies ain’t got no clothes! well…also because those fairies take about 3 minutes to complete a turn before you’re allowed to move again)

Are you sure that you aren’t a closet hedonist who’s having trouble coming to terms with that, and hiding it behind a veil of over-exaggerated modesty in order to camouflage it with normality? ;p

I tease, as I subscribe (at least partially) to the ethics of hedonism myself, which may explain why a lack o modesty is nothing more than a point of amusement for me. I like making fun of Jack because I find the lack of clothes there really funny. And at the end of the day we’re just animals anyway, so people are going to make the characters of the gender they favour sexually attractive regardless. And nothing other than an underlying, pervasive level of perversion throughout our society can explain that.

Everyone’s a pervert, I’d think, it’s just that some hide it better than others!

If you really are bothered by a lack of clothes though then you could just do what I’m doing (albeit for a different reason) and pick a Charr character, because with the Charr all the wobbly and dangly bits are covered up in fur, which should meet any required quotient of modesty. But if you can’t play a Charr because you don’t find them attractive, then go with a human female and just roll with it. No one’s going to think of you as anything less for being an everyday mortal like the rest of us!

To be honest, the only way I’d ever have a problem with Guild Wars females would be if they were portrayed as sex objects, intended for people to drool and fap over, with all females portrayed as being flirty and slutty. I could name examples of that, but I won’t. The females of Guild Wars always struck me as being very strong (Gwen, for example), so they can wear whatever they like and I can still respect them.

Though really, if it bothers you then perhaps high fantasy isn’t for you? You don’t need to like everything, but it’s pretty much a rule that high fantasy obeys the laws of narrative, not physics, so modesty isn’t really a requirement, not even for armour efficiency.

Goodness, I love high fantasy and would be loathe to leave it behind. Maybe you have been steeped so long in Midriffs & Magic that you think they’re inseparable. =) But why should that be so? This is a strange association you have in your mind, to say essentially: “Do you like wizards, golems, and rangers? Do you prefer swords to gun, platemail to kevlar, horses to tanks? All of these things and more can be yours, but NATURALLY it will require you to look at drawings of women in their underwear. Oh, you think you shouldn’t? Maybe Modern Warfare 2 is more your thing, then.”

o_O

To expound: I am in favor of the existence of the aforementioned wobbly bits. But I am not in favor of seeing so many of them publicly, because it is an obstacle to my ultimate plan. What is my ultimate plan? It is to celebrate the existence of such bits by spending my whole life in studied appreciation of a singular person’s. I think it is a sort of glorious but exclusive thing, like a magnificent secret — and when I get married I should like for my wife to know that I depend on her and dwell on her as wholly as possible. To this end, it helps if I avoid presenting my eyes with various bits from various people, even CGI ones. I think that in the long term this will be more satisfactory even in terms of hedonism =P but also in terms of loving her as best I can.

Rather than insist you become the same way, I just want to note that in my case (and probably some others), the old phrase “sex sells” is completely reversed — for the reasons above, I avoid buying things that display overt, surface sexuality. Blame my ignoble eyes for the required increase in discipline; that’s fair enough. :-) But my long-term goals and sexual philosophy have kept me from buying a lot of games that would otherwise have been great fun! :( It saddens me, especially when the skimpy clothes are a stupid, irrelevant addition that does not even contribute to characterization — like some of the characters you mentioned before, who are so strong and secure and focused on victory, you wonder how they ever decided “Today I will wear gauze.” And it saddens me that I have missed the gaming experiences — but I consider it a worthwhile sacrifice. :-)

( and silly as it could seem to you — I’m quite sure there are a lot of people like me, who have passed on games that had skimpy outfits, because we want to wear something DECENT while practicing wizardry and splattering ourselves in the carnage we have wrought, ripping out the teeth and cutting off the tails of our enemies in order to hear a “ding!” sound ) …. if you don’t believe me, visit ccgr.org =P

So there seems to be quite some love for the original Guild Wars here on RPS. My question is: Would the game (plus addons) still be fun if I start playing today? Steam has a tempting offer right now (17,49€ for the Trilogy).
I’d only play it for fun and that would mostly be solo as I don’t have time for guilds and stuff nowadays. Is it possible to have fun that way? Actually, what is the experience like anyway? Solo-WoW-style? Diablo-esque?

You can play solo, no problem. I’d recommend starting in the Nightfall Campaign, since that is by far the best story-line, is generous with money and gives you immediate access to Heroes.

Heroes and Henchmen are the sidekicks you’ll be taking with you to flesh out your party when solo. Heroes are customisable in terms or skills & equipment, and are also fairly interesting character wise.

Once you’ve got to a certain point in the Nightfall campaign, you can cross to the other campaigns and pick them up half-way. However, for the Prophecies campaign I’d suggest making at least one character to play through the beginning: it is at least quite interesting (but not, IMO, necessary for the rest of the Prophecies campaign).

And thus continues the doomed cycle of civilisation, each meta-group of races destroying the lower group for levelgrind. Why did you think the Elder Dragons decided today was the day to mop up the upstarts? Clearly annoying gnomes drop excellent loot.

Aaaactually it’s because the life on Tyria was the creation of the Gods, and the Dragons absolutely despise the Gods and oppose them in any way they can, as far as I’m aware they just want to wipe the world clean so that they can create it in their own image. Hence the genocide.

Buuuut… hey, if your explanation works for you! What can I say? I like GW lore.

They said in an interview that they’re aiming for scalability with lower-end computers, they explained that the poly count isn’t that much higher than Guild Wars, and it should be able to run on just about any moderate computer. Their stance has always been art > polygons and shaders.

Well i´m currently playing Wurm Online and having a blast, so im certainly no graphics whore…. but whats a bit of whoring now and then eh?
Just hoping ill get my new quad-core rig together by the time of release date. The gameplay in the original was, yes, fast paced, and a lot less grindy than AoC, WoW, etc. with some fun to be had with different skill builds aswell.. only problem these days with the 1st, is that the graphics are looking a bit dated.
So i´m kindof starting to look forward to this one !

I think most modern MMOs look fairly shit by comparison, and even the prettiest are just about barely a visual match for Guild Wars. I just spent some time looking over Aion shots, and even Aion, as new as it is, could only just match Guild Wars blow for blow.

That’s because the effort they put into the art of the game doesn’t age, whereas graphical effects like shaderspam do.

Also, where are we getting this gore thing from? As far as I’ve seen in just about every review, the call for gore is just hope by part of the fans who want buckets of blood (what they want that for is beyond me). Everything I’ve seen thus far has only supported blood trails with some weapons, which Guild Wars 1 had. There’s not going to be any ‘gore’ in Guild Wars 2 at all, it’s going to be like Champions Online, where people react physically to attacks but there’s no gore.

Wait. Really? The characters in the game really are constantly making irritating, inane comments like this?

And RPS just posts these videos without mercilessly mocking them? Really? You guys are all really OK with that? You’d be able to play a game like that for more than ten minutes without clawing your ears out? Really? No one else finds this hilariously, astonishingly, stupidly bad?

I think you might be overreacting a tad. And by a tad, I mean a lot. Having the occasional corny one-liner associated with your finishing attack would be pretty neat, actually. Gets around the traditional problem of the deathly-silent mute protagonist.

Anyway, there was a lot of background chatter from party members in the first game.

I like fun and frivolity. But this is an MMO, right? You’re going to be killing a lot of monsters. And those characters will have how many “finishing” phrases? 10? 20? You think “There’s one to remember me by!” is going to still seem frivolous the 43rd time you hear it?

And the tone just doesn’t seem to match up very well. I loved the corny battle dialogue in Freedom Force: “Howbout a lead sammich?” “None can stand against me!” “Rings of Rexxor!”, “Fall heroes! For you meet your doom!” “For Freeeedom!”

But here? This GW2 dialogue sounds like 20th century American action heroes, not otherworldly high fantasy.

And catch phrases are fine for specific characters. If El Diablo says “Hot stuff comin’ through!”, that’s his character being corny. But if every single sorceress in an MMO quips, “I’m so stunning!” when she throws a lightning bolt, no matter what the player does with her name, backstory, role-playing, etc., that’s much lamer.

Dominic White said:
I think you might be overreacting a tad. And by a tad, I mean a lot. Having the occasional corny one-liner associated with your finishing attack would be pretty neat, actually.

No. Character voice in MMOs is always a bad idea. Granted, what we see here is definitely not as bad as Aion(because it’s not asian whimpers, squeals and hiyans), but it’s still lame at best, annoying at worst. They could at least drop the horrible puns.

Look at you fool, all abiding by the simple rules of discussion, while you could simply be using the “psychiatrist strategy”, nodding and following with an “hmmm” supposed to prove your interest, but it’s all a lie and you know it very well don’t you !

Really, now we’ll have guys worried about other people paying too much attention to their gibber. You must be kidding.

It is a pleasure to see so many former Guild Wars players on RPS. I have recently got back into the game and, with some luck, I’ll get at least something to put in my Hall of Monuments for when I import my account into Guild Wars 2.

Regarding the character professions, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Paragon is back. For a game focused on party combat like Guild Wars, it would only make sense. As much as I enjoy coming up with interesting Dervish combinations, the flavour of the class would not fit in the base game. Perhaps we shall see a similar class in an expansion?

I’m really tempted to snag the original now to try it. I’ve never been a fan of the grind method of play most MMORPGs employ, and this review has me really excited. Now i’ve just got to make sure GW1 will run on my ancient computer. >.>

I missed out on the start of GW1, but since I discovered it, I have just over 6000 hours played in a little over 36 months. GW2 indications seem even better. I can’t see my time on the game diminishing at all. At this point, I do not play other games and am still finding new and interesting things to do. Congratulations to A-Net on another probable winner.

Yeah, so, about the voices. I think they’re all right as long as they are not overused in every single battle, mission, etc. It would be awesome if they had a finishing phrase where you can say like:
You like that?!?!?! Stay down and consider yourself pwned!
Then again that would be too aggresive…

As for the videos, they looks nice, not sure if you guys heard this but you can have sort of a teamwork attack. I heard that for example, if an elementalist did a move called fire wall and a warrior did cyclone axe the fire wall will spread out probably causing more damage. I’m wondering what else would be possible.